A performance of a play about the embattled Russian protest group Pussy Riot was disrupted in Moscow when immigration officials
approached the Swiss director to ask for his travel documents.

Immigration authorities entered the Sakharov human rights museum, where the play was being staged, and harangued the director Milo Rau for holding a business visa that supposedly did not allow for work activity.

The play was later disrupted a second time when Orthodox Christian nutters and Cossacks gathered outside the venue to protest what they claimed was the play's antireligious content.

The play, called The Moscow Trials , tells the story of last year's trial of three Pussy Riot members for hooliganism after staging a protest against Vladimir Putin in Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral.

Shortly after two members of Russian punk rock group Pussy Riot were released from prison as part of a propaganda attempt to clean up Russia's public image ahead of the 2014 Sochi Games, comes news that a screening of a documentary about the group's
trial and subsequent imprisonment has been shut down by officials in Moscow. The U.S. made documentary is titled, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer .

The theater where the documentary was to be screened received a letter from Sergei Kapkov, the head of Moscow's cultural department, forcing a cancellation of the screening on the basis that theaters that accept public funding are not to screen films
that provoke society:

Letter Kirill Serebrennikov, the director of the Gogol Center theater, announced the move on his Facebook page and posted a copy of the letter:

Until recently, in all interviews, I would declare like a mantra: 'There's no censorship at the theater, there's no censorship at the theater.' That's it, fuck, there's censorship at the theater! Cynical, pointless and stupid.

Members of the punk rock band Pussy Riot were arrested for their criticism of Putin while performing in a Moscow cathedral. The performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky once sat naked in front of Lenin's Mausoleum, and nailed his scrotum to the
stone pavement. He was later taken away by the police. The art duo Blue Noses is famous for a photograph of two Russian policemen kissing and embracing each other while in uniform.

They are all, along with other protest artists who work in Russia, part of the Art Riot: Post-Soviet Actionism exhibit whiched opened on 16th November at London's Saatchi Gallery.